Alrighty then.I'm liking Vista so far, though I normally have to restart due to a bug or crash at least once per day. I'm sure they get it working properly eventually (or is Windows 7 just an admission that they've given up?).

I would use XP on this machine if I could. But XP doesn't support Quad SLI, can't take more than ~3GB and doesn't support all the features of the sound card I installed (I was also told it doesn't fully support Quad CPUs, but I'm not sure if that's true). There's loads of other little features that XP doesn't support as well. However once 7 is launched I'll be swapping on to that.

The performance hit when using Vista over XP is very noticeable in all my games however (even with better hardware). So I hope 7 will remain as the in-between ground. At least the beta was looking that way when I was trying it.

The only really good thing about Vista for me is when a game freezes you hit ctrl+alt+del and you get a screen to launch taskmanager. This means you don't need to hit the hard reset button. Normally under XP if this happens you need to pray the task manager will "spawn" on top of your crashed game. Also being able to alter partitions in Vista is a lot easier than XP.

No problems on install. Now it's just the usual stuff like driver updates, anti-virus etc.

My only complaint so far (after 5 mins of using) is the Control Panel has been made "User Friendly", and it doing so a nightmare to navigate. I liked CP the way it was thank you. Nice and complex and univiting to users. Now it's like "anyone can fuck up their machine, and we'll help you do it with pretty pictures".

They have removed or hidden the "complicate" button for the control panel.

Just a small warning, anything that was made for the beta is unlikely to run on the RC. You need to get a special version of AVG (if that's what you use) for the RC. There's also less hardware support. There's nothing for my sound card atm, and I had to force Vista drivers to get my wireless "dongle" working. I can't find a 64 bit firewall that will work, so I'm going to wait a bit before continuing to play.

(One nice thing though is you can use the special AVG trails' root kit scanner on other partitions, so I took advantage of this by doing a rootkit scan for free)

Unless you spend a lot of time on sites that are very dodgey, I wouldn't worry so much about the firewall, you have MS firewall (better than nothing) and the router one working to give you some protection. Smart browsing is far better protection than any number of shiny bits of software. I've seen a fair few PCs infested despite being "protected" by Norton, McAfee and others. Damn kids and their love of free stuff.

BT wrote:My only complaint so far (after 5 mins of using) is the Control Panel has been made "User Friendly", and it doing so a nightmare to navigate. I liked CP the way it was thank you. Nice and complex and univiting to users. Now it's like "anyone can fuck up their machine, and we'll help you do it with pretty pictures".

Having installed it, I can tell you that there is an easy fix for that.